Li Guangming is a man with multiple identities and abilities. As the director of Sunshine International Art Museum---a privately-run and none-profit art museum well known in Beijing, Li Guangming is dedicated to the public welfare undertaking of art, and insists on painting in his own way and has scored abundant accomplishment. When talking about his artistic works, we should not neglect his identity of curator. When talking about his museum, we should know his art works. These two identities are complementary to each other and he always surprises us with his ground-breaking achievement in both fields.
There are not so many people in art circle who clearly know his way of creating. People would often neglect his identity of artist for the reason that he has devoted too much of himself to the art museum. In fact Li Guangming is more of an artist than a curator. Besides painting in traditional ways, he is quite an experimental artist and successful man in various fields. Despite his cross-boundary career, he has always been pursuing one goal. Closely following reality, he wants to emphasize the importance of social intervention and artistic experiments, which he believes will instill vitality to today’s culture. It turns out that those ideas help him with his career as a curator and artist and enable him to challenge the existing boundaries.
I got to know him ten years ago when he was planning a huge performance art with the subject of the Great Wall. I was really impressed by that huge project for its wide coverage. Although that plan was not completed, I saw Li Guangming’s ambition and aspiration. As a matter of fact, Sunshine International Art Museum is an extension of his “Great Wall Plan”, which was aimed to break though the walls and to make bridges among people. Now I understand why he chose the subject of the Great Wall in his performance art and synthetic material works later on. Because as a symbol of Chinese traditional culture, the Great Wall cut off the communication between China and other countries and led to the result that China fell behind the other part of the world for quite a while. Instead of reminiscing the old times, he bade a farewell to the past. His latest works, Sadness of City, convey historic relics contrasted with the opening-up society of today. Li Guangming draws his power from the comparison between the new and the old, the opening-up and conservativeness, thus gains success in various fields.
For these ten years, Li Guangming has created a great many works in forms of performance art, installation, painting and architecture. It is worth noting that all the intermediaries and materials he employs carry double meanings and relate to each other. For instance, instead of using Chinese brush and Ink, he melted frozen ice sculptures made of waste water on Xuan paper and got his works from the natural stains. Combining performance art with installation, the work conveyed an important message that the industrial society has been devastating the eco-system, and drew attention to environmental conservation. Li Guangming is like a wizard who swiftly switches from the motional to the still, from the beautiful to the ugly, and among all kinds of social conflictions and performs his magic of art. I’d also like to mention another piece of his work of exhausted fumes. He magically turned frozen fumes into delicate abstract sculptures. What an innovative artist he is to criticize the reality and to transform normal things into great beauty. That is where the essence of art lies, and that is the difference between art and cultural criticism. For Li Guangming, he likes playing different roles in society and tries various forms of arts. All in all, he probes deeply into the true nature of what it is the appearance.
June 17, 2010
In Tongzhou, Beijing
(文：Yang Wei/摄影：/责任编辑：baishitou)
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